Thermodynamics 101

[milon]

The right-hand building provides the best example of this.  The two heaters were able to thaw the snow in their rooms (95c) and the rooms adjacent to them (20c), but the central one-tile room remains frozen, equilibrated with the outside temperature of -7 degrees.

Is the central tile roofed? It's hard to tell from the screen shot.

[Hans Lemurson]

Yes, the whole building is roofed.  I took the screenshot with the cursor over the central tile to make it clear the status of the tile, but the cursor didn't get captured. 

The lower left-hand info-corner says "Constructed roof" and the lower right-hand one says "Indoors -7C", but there is no indication as to what was actually being pointed to! 

[Hans Lemurson]

Another thermodynamics observation:  Heat leaks through roofs!

Rooms exchange heat with the environment not just through their perimeter walls, but also have a small amount of heat-flow through each tile of roof.  Two rooms with the same perimeter, but different areas, will have different temperatures (for the same heat-supply).

Further, if you make a "Room within a Room", and have your temperature supply in the outer-ring, the inner room will be a few degrees closer to the outdoors temperature than the outer-ring is.

[dv]

I wonder how miserable it would be to try to play a mod with "Realistic Power Consumption" that got everything obeying the conservation of energy.

Depends. Do I get a 1MW wind generator?

[Dorian]

Frankly, I can't be bothered to care overmuch, even though it's fun to speculate on the "why" and "how" of the mechanics.  Remember, the essential point of the current values given is to effect a specific balance of resources (man-hours, materials, power) in the game, not pretend to be a fine-grained reality sim .

After reading this whole thread, I tend to agree with the quote above.  There are some legit points that were made, but overall, this isn't supposed to be an electrical/thermodynamics simulator.  We have tribes people who are able to extract steel from rocks and create solar panels and batteries with them, with no tools and real explanation why or how they're able to do this, so I think there's too much overthinking going on.  Just enjoy keeping your colonists happy and alive, or make their lives miserable, whichever way you want to go.   

[Perq]

Why do you keep repeating that it isn't about being scientifically accurate when we agreed on that long ago. Nobody is asking for it to be mesh-level simulation. People are simply saying that some thing are simply completely ridiculous, and can be laid out better (including balance). More so - adding some stuff might make game more fun (more things that can go wrong), and even maybe some people could learn something in the process.